Apocalypse for Beginners
Page 18
I could always post a small advertisement in a daily newspaper, but without harbouring any illusions: Tokyo’s population was in the vicinity of thirty-six million. In order to get results, I would likely have to repeat the operation in several periodicals over a number of weeks, if not months. Mrs. Hikari offered to send me a list of addresses if I wished.
No, I did not wish.
In fact, I felt as though I did not wish anything any more.
I thanked Mrs. Hikari and hung up. The clock on my computer showed 7:14 p.m. I glanced over the partitions of the cubicles. No one in sight.
95. ETHNOLOGICAL OBSERVATION NO. 743
The human race had invented an antidote to this sort of day: Mrs. Ngô’s shrimp rolls.
Out of luck: the store was closed. “Back in 5 minutes” the makeshift sign said, but even though I had a whole lifetime (or what was left of it) ahead of me, I went across the street to the MaxiPrix. Not a great place to be vaporized, but no worse, when you thought about it, than in front of a Vietnamese convenience store.
In the pharmacy, the air conditioners were set to full blast. Standing behind the cosmetics counter, a saleslady in a smock was holding a spray bottle and polishing the glass with as much enthusiasm as a clerk at the city morgue.
I headed for Aisle 5—cleaning products and food.
The ramen display was utterly mind-boggling. MaxiPrix stocked every flavour in the universe! It had been years since my last bowl of ramen—my last year of university, no doubt—and I looked around for Captain Mofuku. Not that I really had a craving—far from it—but I somehow felt nostalgic. Maybe it was just the desire to give the whole story a kind of closure with a familiar taste.
I searched all through the ramenopedia but there was no Mofuku to be found there. The company must have been absorbed by another instant-food Cyclops based in Asia.
All this rot-proof food made me lose my appetite and I quickly moved away from Aisle 5.
I strolled around the pharmacy looking for an omen and ended up in the sanitary napkins section. What sort of omen could this be?
Ethnological observation No. 743: MaxiPrix sold almost as many varieties of sanitary napkins as of ramen. Super-absorbent, extra-thin, super-mini, long with wings, 3-D system, overnight Protection-Plus, patented solution, assured freedom. I discreetly peeled open the lid of a box. Inside, each napkin was individually wrapped in a plastic sleeve. I pictured these delicate rose petals at the bottom of the municipal dump, cheek by jowl with the Styrofoam coffee cups.
I carefully inspected the box for an expiry date. There was none.
I left the MaxiPrix empty handed. Across the street, the convenience store still announced that it would be opening in five minutes. What if the sign had been hung up two hours earlier and old Ngô had accidentally shut himself inside the beer refrigerator? I would have to face the end of the world without Mrs. Ngô’s shrimp rolls. There was no end of nuisances that I would have to bear.
On the corner of the street an old orange Datsun had just overheated. The driver had lifted the hood and a plume of black smoke drifted skyward. A big Italian man burst out of the nearby jewellery store armed with a fire extinguisher, and he blanketed everything—the Datsun, the fire and the driver—in a cumulus of carbonic snow.
What sort of comedy had I stumbled into?
Back home, the mailbox had come under assault: a bagful of circulars, three bills, an offer for a credit card and the menu of a sushi bar. I climbed the stairs slowly. My head was spinning and I urgently needed to find something edible within the next five minutes. The sushi option suddenly looked a little more attractive.
I flung down the pile of mail, which fanned out on the dining table, and I noticed a light blue envelope with a red border. Airmail paper.
A dozen Japanese stamps covered half of the envelope.
96. TODAY’S ACTIVE YOUNG JAPANESE WOMAN
I went to sit on the balcony holding the letter in one hand, a Heineken in the other, and my penknife between my teeth.
Sipping my beer several times, I looked at the envelope. I was reluctant to open or even touch this supernatural, blinding apparition. I almost expected it to disappear at any moment. But it stayed there, in my lap, unmistakably tangible.
On the reverse side someone had written an interminable address. A Tokyo address.
I imagined Hope giving the flap a lick, wiping away a pearl of saliva with her thumb and then, as serious as a child, doing a series of unbelievable quantum calculations with the stub of a pencil to make sure that the envelope would leave at the right time, cross the entire planet, going from one plane to another, from one post office to another, and arrive in my hands exactly today, at sunset.
The stamps were exquisite, a veritable trove of Japanese iconography: giant squid, Mount Fuji and several Hello Kittys.
What was I afraid of?
I finished my beer and gathered my courage. A stroke of the knife and the envelope was slit open. There was nothing in it except for a bland plastic wrapper, empty as well. Nothing else. Not a word, not a letter, not even a haiku on a Post-it.
Just an empty wrapper.
I smoothed it out with the palm of my hand and examined it carefully, intrigued at first, then incredulous, and finally a hair’s breadth away from a nervous breakdown. Despite the absence of any Latin script, there could be no ambiguity as to the product that this wrapper had contained.
Sanitary napkins.
More specifically (based on my recently acquired expertise), these were extra-thin, hypoallergenic napkins with NanoNikki™ micropores and super-leakproof-yet-ultrasoft wings. A model made for today’s active young Japanese woman.
Hope Randall was no longer a medical mystery.
97. WHAT CAME NEXT
Mirabel Airport was gently sliding downhill. Its impending death had been announced for years. Decried, despised and soon decommissioned: the great cycle of life.
As for me, I was quite happy to depart from Mirabel. Given the growing rumours of closure, I felt like a visitor among virtual ruins—the ideal blend of archaeology and science fiction. Shielded by the glass wall, I tried to imagine an abandoned airport. How much time would it take before the couch grass crept into the joints of this flawless concrete? Before the tarmac was breached by tufts of straw, by willows and dogwoods and alders?
The perennial questions of a Bauermann.
I turned away from the glass wall. The terminal was deserted, peaceful and depressing at the same time. All that was missing was a scattering of the living dead.
A few dozen passengers bided their time near Gate 12: globetrotting women on a budget, farm machinery salesmen, nuns, middle-class Mexicans drinking bottled water, migrant workers, thirty-year-olds in worn-out jeans. The grandeur and misery of the low season.
The flight attendants took their positions at the check-in counter, and I drew a whole collection of boarding passes out of my pocket. I had purchased an exotic ticket on the Internet, an unbeatable deal, which would mean flying to Acapulco, San Diego and Honolulu before finally heading for Tokyo—in total, thirty-one hours of travelling.
The time needed to think about what came next.
Behind the counter a flight attendant picked up the intercom handset, cleared her throat and welcomed us aboard Air Transat flight 1707 to Acapulco.
“This is a pre-boarding announcement. Passengers requiring assistance or travelling with small children, please proceed to Gate 12.”
The passengers stood up. Stretched. Checked their luggage. A line soon formed in front of the counter. The atmosphere gradually became charged with the tension generated by the imminent departure, but I remained serene. Leaning my back against the glass wall, I fanned myself with the sheaf of boarding tickets. I felt light, immortal. I was Paul Newman.
Things were much better now that the end of the world was behind us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Despite impressions to the contrary, a novelist is never completely alone.
I
wish to thank a number of people who have contributed to the making of this book, starting with Antoine Tanguay, who patiently listened to me construct and deconstruct the project, and whose maverick erudition nourished my thinking at various times. Bernard Wright-Laflamme, Martin Beaulieu and Pierre Blais read and commented on the text and corrected certain factual mistakes. Jeremy Barnes assisted me in clarifying the relationship between nuclear explosions and citrus fruits (although the calculations in Chapter 17 are my own, and I take full responsibility for the errors or inconsistencies that may be found there). Masumi Kaneko and Julie Sirois translated the Rough Planet excerpts. Isabel Flores Oliva was there.
A warm word of appreciation for Lazer Lederhendler, my trusted translator, who worked at a breakneck pace and produced an exceptional translation. Very special thanks go to Pamela Murray, whose enthusiasm, intelligence, and sharp eye helped make this English version into an edition in its own right. Thanks also to Shaun Oakey and Kathryn Exner. Editors exist to show that a text can still be improved after five hundred readings.
Finally, I want to express my gratitude to my family, in particular Marie Wright-Laflamme, Jean-Luc Laflamme and Louise Plante, without whose support the manuscript would have advanced at the painful rate of fifteen kilometres a day.
NICOLAS DICKNER’s first novel, Nikolski, won three awards in Quebec, one in France, and was the winner of Canada Reads 2010. He currently writes a weekly column for Voir, and is working on his next novel.
LAZER LEDERHENDLER won the Governor General’s Literary Award for his work on Nikolski, which also won a Quebec Writers’ Federation Award. He lives in Montreal.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1. Vaporized
2. The Pet Shop
3. The Randalls
4. Purely Accidental
5. A Disturbing Logic
6. Teach Yourself Russian at Home
7. Struck Down by Fate
8. Einstein’s Twenty-Five Suits
9. The Last Great Mania
10. Cold Fusion
11. Perfectly Livable for Extended Periods
12. Termites
13. Please Avoid the Verbs To Be and To Have
14. Grenzmauer
15. Kaboom!
16. The Dawn of a New Era
17. Megalemons
18. An Ordinary Component of Everyday Reality
19. Einstein was Wrong
20. Tora! Tora! Tora!
21. A Little Prayer
22. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Psychiatry
23. A Fairly Optimistic View of the Universe
24. Pa Rum Pum Pum Pum
25. Mayhem at the Saint Vincent De Paul
26. Chimps in the Closet
27. Hunter-Gatherer
28. Disturbing News
29. Amenorrhea Mysteriosa
30. Randall Thinking
31. One Day at a Time
32. Texture
33. In Friendly Territory
34. Anything that Burns
35. I am Shiva
36. In the Baths of Rome
37. The Most Natural Event on Earth
38. Spices and Colouring
39. Marcus was Here
40. Television is the Enemy
41. The Ophir III
42. Banished from Eden
43. Details on Page 47
44. Satellite TV
45. The Beginning of the World
46. Plutonium
47. A Tiny Oasis of Warmth
48. Crumbs and Foam Rubber
49. The End is Nigh
50. More Reliable than a Package of Ramen
51. The Most Unpleasant Publisher in the Known Universe
52. A Rapidly Expanding Niche
53. Mission
54. Greyhound
55. Menu for Travellers
56. There Were No Good Old Days
57. Labyrinth
58. Poor Chuck Starts to have Problems
59. Supercharged
60. You are Leaving the American Sector
61. May I Borrow Your Gas Mask?
62. The Great Primal Soup
63. Cul-De-Sac
64. 1945
65. An Impossible Angle
66. An Increasing Tolerance for the Unlikely
67. Raid
68. Mutation
69. Modern Art
70. The Gyre
71. Carpet Bombing
72. In Space and Time
73. Better Equipped Than in 546
74. Killing Time
75. Scientific Discovery of the Day
76. The Nineteenth Stop
77. Madame Sicotte
78. Thirty-Seven Minutes
79. Crosswords Weekly
80. Distorting the Collective Psyche
81. A Unique Ability
82. The Speed of the World
83. Under a Different Light
84. A Three-Thousand-Year Voyage
85. Weapon of Mass Destruction
86. Does Anyone Still Talk about Nuclear Winter?
87. Incandescent Waves
88. A Serious Dent in Reality
89. The Burden of Perpetuation
90. Kiln
91. Only about Thirty Hours of Anxiety Left
92. Madame Hikari
93. An Ordinary Day
94. Take Heart!
95. Ethnological Observation No. 743
96. Today’s Active Young Japanese Woman
97. What Came Next
Acknowledgments
About the Author